Posted on December 7th, 2012

That fascism is a right-wing phenomenon is an oft-repeated fallacy. One of the virtues of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is detailing the left-wing aspects of fascism in its origins, such as Mussolini’s discarding of Christianity for “statolatry,” as we saw in an earlier post. As Goldberg observes, there is nothing “right-wing” about it:

Mussolini’s radical lust to make the state an object of religious fervor was born in the French Revolution, and Mussolini, an heir to the Jacobins, sought to rekindle that fire. No project could be less conservative or less right-wing.

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning